A while back it was announced by Halmont, the developers that CUBA Platform would become open source. Well, the good news is it that it finally happened. The Platform comes in two variations. One which is distributed under open source Apache 2.0 license while the other comes under a commercial license.
The main difference between the two distributions is the presence of premium add-ons. They are available under Windows, Mac, and Linux.
CUBA Platform is a Java-based web application development framework. It consists of three major components. The components are the Framework, the Developer tools, and premium Add-ons.
Like other major development platforms out there, CUBA Platform seeks to abstract the underlying complexities from the developer thereby making them more production and business task focused.
To create standard interfaces one does not need to know HTML, CSS or JavaScript. This is in spite of the platform being a web application framework. Instead, the interface is declared in XML and the development is done in Java.
Features of Interest With the CUBA Platform
There is a whole array of features found in CUBA Platform which would clutter this article. To highlight the features we can mention stuff like the platform supports multiple languages, UI styles customization, a built-in reporting engine and Interactive charts. Google Maps integration is built in as well as a generic data filter.
Admin tools, the ability to schedule tasks and data access control make it into the platform. One also gets full-text search, asynchronous email sending, and business process management. Time zones are also supported for global access.
Major database management systems come supported as well as file system storage. The system can be run on-premise just as well as in the cloud.
The web development tool of choice here is CUBA Studio. It has all the tools and configurations needed to get up and running within no time. Studio can be used in conjunction with other major Java Integrated Development Environments (IDEs).
Like many other popular IDEs, CUBA Studio comes with a WYSIWYG Editor and code generation and deployment tools. The plugins that allow use with other IDEs is the IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse plugins.
With Premium Add-ons developers can extend their application’s capabilities with minimal effort. There are Add-ons that extend tasks related to Reporting. This is include handling complex DOC, DOCX, ODT, XLS, XLSX, HTML file formats.
Business process management functions can also be extended with Add-ons. Chats and maps get a major boost with Add-ons. This includes a stock chart, a Gantt chart, and other advance charts. You may also add full-text search capabilities to your projects easily with the relevant Add-on.
Some of the dependencies on third-party frameworks in CUBA Platform include Spring Framework, Vaadin, AmCharts, Lucene, Gradle, and Tomcat. CUBA Studio requires Java SE Development Kit (JDK) Version 8.
You can download the latest version of CUBA Plaform from the official download page here. Optionally or alternatively, you can get the source code from the Github repository here.
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